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Anthologies That (Mostly) Stand the Test of Time

By Gregory Cowles May 17, 2013 11:41 amMay 17, 2013 11:41 am

Fiction anthologies don’t always stand the test of time. There is, surrounding prize anthologies especially, an inevitable whiff of Ozymandias — these were the best writers of their day, the editors proclaimed, yet who today has heard of most of them? But I love old anthologies partly for the light they cast on the flip side of the Ozymandias legend: sure, the king will crumble into dust just like the rest of us, but he still managed to create great works while he lived. And even if we’re not familiar with all of the writers in these volumes, they still wrote some pretty good stories in their time. Look on their works, ye Mighty, and celebrate.

Writers recommend older or lesser-known books in a category of their choosing.

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The “Best American” collections are the literary equivalent of K-Tel records, offering up reliable if predictable sounds from a given era. The 1992 edition, curated by Robert Stone, has an especially strong ratio of hits to misses — Alice Munro is here, as are Tobias Wolff and Lorrie Moore — and Stone deserves extra kudos for being the first B.A.S.S. editor to recognize David Foster Wallace’s genius, plucking his epic diving-board story “Forever Overhead” from the journal Fiction International. (The brief discussions at the back of each volume — I think of them as liner notes — are one of the pleasures of the “Best American” series, and Wallace’s is characteristically hilarious and tortured, complete with a philosophical footnote: “Is ‘successful’ the same as ‘good’ here? Does inclusion in B.A.S.S. render a story de facto ‘good’ the way a human reverend’s pronouncement effects a legally binding union?”)

But to my mind the highlight of the 1992 “Best American” is Denis Johnson’s “Emergency,” which anchored his collection “Jesus’ Son” later that year and begins with the narrator talking to his friend Georgie, a stoned orderly at the hospital where they both work. “What are you crying for?” the narrator asks Georgie, who responds: “What am I crying for? Jesus. Wow, oh boy, perfect.” It’s a fleeting, impressionistic story — a man comes to the emergency room with a knife sticking out of his eye; the narrator and Georgie drive around until they’re lost, and chance across a drive-in movie in the snow; baby rabbits are rescued, briefly — and it’s a gorgeous comic masterpiece, one of the best American short stories of 1992 or any other year.

The “American Fiction” series, begun by Birch Lane Press and now published by New Rivers, has an inauspicious subtitle, at once hopeful and defeatist: “The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers.” Doesn’t “best unpublished” just mean the best work nobody else wanted? But never mind — this series, like the annual Pushcart Prizes, applauds writers who operate outside the glare of the glossies, and it yields some eccentric gems in the rough. “American Fiction No. 2,” published in 1991 with Louise Erdrich on board as the guest judge, includes a story about a circus caravan at an Iowa weigh station, another about a dyslexic car salesman with marriage problems and a third — Ms. Erdrich’s favorite — about a golf course manager who reaches a complicated truce with a cart thief. That story’s author, Clint McCown, also took top honors in “American Fiction No. 4,” raising the question of just how many times someone can qualify as an “emerging writer.” But a line from the golf story, “Home Course Advantage,” speaks nicely to the feisty independent spirit that animates this small-press enterprise: “He loved the game, but he wasn’t cut out for business, and success made a business out of any game.”

There was a time when people talked about the “New Yorker story” as a genre unto itself, as shorthand for a polished slice-of-life tale of suburban ennui. But any magazine willing to print Donald Barthelme as well as John Cheever, or George Saunders as well as Alice Munro, has a more protean sensibility than it gets credit for. “55 Short Stories From The New Yorker,” a 1949 anthology that anticipated the magazine’s 25th anniversary, proves that it always did. The volume collects a “representative” group of stories from the previous 10 years, including a handful of undisputed classics by writers as different as J.D. Salinger (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish”), Shirley Jackson (“The Lottery”) and — yes — John Cheever (“The Enormous Radio”). If the book’s editors were overgenerous to New Yorker staff members, with stories from Roger Angell, Wolcott Gibbs, Brendan Gill and more, they made up for it with memorable selections from Daniel Fuchs, Vladimir Nabokov and Carson McCullers, among others. I have a particular fondness for a writer underappreciated today, John McNulty, whose great character study “Man Here Keeps Getting Arrested All the Time” starts like this: “Grogan got arrested again Thursday. Talking in this place on Third Avenue Friday night, he said he was getting sick and tired of it. That’s about the ninth time he got arrested lately. He seems to be having a streak.” McNulty puts the “New York” into the “New Yorker story,” and makes me smile every time.